1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information display device that displays the application screens of a plurality of types of applications individually, and a recording medium with a control program for the information display device recorded therein.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, information display devices such as mobile phones have become increasingly sophisticated, and the screen size has been increased along with it. However, the screen size is limited due to their portability, and therefore the increase of the screen size has been actualized by a plurality of display sections being provided. For example, in an information display device such as a mobile phone whose two housings are foldably connected via a hinge section, the increase of the screen size is actualized by a display section being provided in each housing and these two display sections being openable in a manner similar to a book.
Conventionally, as a technology for allocating information amounting to a plurality of pages to two display sections included in an openable type information display device such as this and displaying the information in the two display sections in a manner similar to a book, an electronic display device has been developed that is configured such that a direction in which the pages of an electronic book is displayed on each screen is controlled in accordance with a direction in which its housings are opened (refer to, for example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open (Kokai) Publication No. 2005-274691).
However, in the above described technology, when display processing is performed based on one application (app) and a page is allocated to each of a plurality of screens, whether information on each screen is displayed vertically or horizontally is determined based only on the common display specification of the application.
The information display devices such as mobile phones have various applications, such as an Internet browser application, an electronic mail application, and a television broadcast receiving application, and their users can run and view these applications simultaneously. However, because each application operates as an independent function, when these applications are initiated and displayed on separate screens, the display control of each screen is performed independently. Therefore, the display directions may differ with each screen, such as when the display direction of information displayed on the screen of one application is horizontal and the display direction of information displayed on the screen of another application is vertical. When the display directions differ with each screen as in the case just described, the displayed contents become difficult to view, and the user may misunderstand them. In addition, changing one of the display directions by user operation every time they are different places a large burden on the user.